Nashville school shooting leaves two dead, including shooter

NASHVILLE, Tennessee – A teenage boy on Jan 22 opened fire inside a Tennessee high school, killing one student and wounding another before taking his own life, the police said.

The Nashville police said in a statement on social media that a 17-year-old male student fired multiple shots using a pistol inside Antioch High School’s cafeteria.

A 16-year-old girl was shot and killed. Another boy, 17, was grazed by a bullet on his arm and wounded.

The police identified the boy who carried out the shooting as Solomon Henderson.

They said the girl killed was Josselin Corea Escalante.

The police are investigating a motive for the violence.

Antioch High School has about 2,000 students and is located in a suburb south-east of Nashville.

The violence is the latest in a series of school shootings witnessed in the US in recent decades, and nearly two years after a shooting at a private Christian school in Nashville left three young students and three school staff dead.

“My heart goes out to these families as they face unimaginable loss,” Metro Nashville public schools director Adrienne Battle said during an afternoon press conference, according to the Tennessean newspaper.

Ms Battle added that Antioch High School has multiple safety measures in place, including a secured vestibule at the school entrance, school resource officers and cameras with weapon-detection software, according to the Tennessean.

There were 330 school shootings in the US in 2024, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database, a website that lists such shootings since 1966.

The total in 2024 was the second highest, topped only by 2023 when there were 349 such incidents, according to the K-12 database. REUTERS